Margaret Thatcher was more than her policies, more than her personality, writes Heather Mallick. She was a force of nature.

Margaret Thatcher, seen in 1980 shortly after taking office as prime minister, was both an elegant woman and an iron-willed politician whose policies radically reshaped Britain. In her way, she was mesmerizing, all razors and honey, writes Heather Mallick

“Ding dong, the witch is dead,” was how many Britons reacted to news of Margaret Thatcher’s death at 87. The rest of them muttered something sonorously appropriate. This extraordinary woman was hated but she was admired too. No, worshipped.

Thatcher was the helmswoman of the hard right turn that was followed by Reagan, Harper, Bush/Cheney, Cameron and the IMF as it rules the EU. Like it or not, she reframed the Western nations and changed the way we all live now, while being the first woman to gain such power. She was astounding.

It seems that for years Brits have been handcrafting and polishing their gleeful reactions to her demise. “What a shame — that it wasn’t 87 years earlier,” tweeted columnist, comedian and historian Mark Steel, proudly born into the working class that Thatcher aimed to either win over or coldly discard.

“Nope. She’s not here,” tweeted @DianaInHeaven.

“We now live in a country in which John Major is our greatest living politician,” said the satirist Armando Iannucci, accurately. Iannucci, brilliant but born to poor Italian immigrants in Glasgow, makes his living eviscerating politicians, dead or alive. If only we did more of it here.

Never having lived under Thatcher rule, Canadians will be mildly shocked at this reaction. Stephen Harper prowls through his agenda like a careful cat slowly circling its basket before sleep. We have not yet lived under a full-bore Thatcherite Hammer of Thor regime: her privatization, deregulation, acceptance of large-scale unemployment as a cost of doing business, racist undercurrent, suspicion of the foreign, driving down of pay.

But when we pass from those who are planning street parties in Manchester on the day Thatcher is lowered into the ground, we find a vast chorus of neo-liberal ideologues and those, like me, who despised her politics while admiring her personal courage.

She was proud to be a grocer’s daughter, having none of the status anxieties of today’s debt-ridden social climbers. “Oh, those poor shopkeepers,” she said as she watched the 1981 inner-city riots on TV as unemployment soared. I say this was understandable, but most would disagree.

These were among the worst city riots of the century. Secret documents later revealed that Thatcher had been willing to write off Liverpool entirely, to give up “pumping water uphill,” as Sir Geoffrey Howe put it, in the poverty-stricken city and its hopeless environs. “Living on a thin line,” the Kinks sang bitterly. “All the stories have been told of kings and days of old, but there’s no England now.” What misery she created!

Her advisers talked her out of abandoning England’s sinkholes, but she had learned a lesson, how to remain aloof amid violence, and it helped her through her terrible showdown with striking miners in 1984 and later the Wapping dispute, which she won, heralding the decline of trade unionism.

WikiLeaks revealed this week what the Americans first thought of her in 1975: “She has a quick, if not profound, mind.” Fair enough.

For a long time everything somehow seemed to go Thatcher’s way, making her PM for 11 years. Her little war in the Falklands won her re-election. What’s strange is that she never succeeded in her true aim: to dismantle the postwar welfare state assembled after the Second World War.

Britons, having saved the planet from tyranny, were worn out and resentful in 1945. Finally, they earned a free National Health Service, which you would have seen celebrated last August at the extraordinary Olympics opening ceremony with dancing nurses gaily spelling out the initials N-H-S.

A social safety net was built, with cash help for the unemployed and disabled, homes for soldiers returned from war and a continuing reformation of the school system so that smart working-class kids would have a shot at entering the best schools.

Thatcher was all about money, getting it, spending it, keeping it. Many of the things she did to make money for the nation would have terrible consequences. She allowed people to buy their own “council houses” from the government, a windfall no doubt, but built none to replace them. Her “Big Bang” deregulation of finance brought so much money into London that only the rich can live there now.

Worse, it was money for nothing. Manufacturing died on Thatcher’s watch. She sold off water and electricity, to foreigners mainly. It was a disaster, because some companies care if your household’s water is clean and plentiful and some companies don’t.

The eeriest thing about Thatcher was her femininity. She didn’t promote women to cabinet and did nothing for them generally, although she didn’t have a high opinion of men either. But she was an elegant woman who dressed with great care and a certain flamboyance, her handbag carried on her wrist like a sidearm, her voice coached into an impressive deepness, all razors and honey.

We remember her this way, in flaming Tory blue suits, pearls and a meringue of pale hair, leaving behind her devastation and fury. It was mesmerizing.

Thatcher fell because power went to her regal head, as it always does. Imagine demanding a poll tax, the same amount to be paid by garbage collectors as by dukes. Imagine forgetting whence you came.

Ken Livingstone, former London mayor and a thorn in Thatcher’s side, summed up her legacy crisply: “She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefit rather than register them as unemployed ... In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.”

I hate to leave it there. To me, she was more than her policies, more than her personality. She was a force of nature.

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